An All-American Eclipse Jay Pasachoff Enjoys Four Books Heralding This Summer’S US Total Solar Eclipse
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BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT ASTRONOMY An all-American eclipse Jay Pasachoff enjoys four books heralding this summer’s US total solar eclipse. n 21 August 2017, the United American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic States will experience its Race to Catch the Shadow of the first all-American total solar Moon and Win the Glory of the World DAVID BARON Oeclipse. The path of totality’s full Liveright: 2017. shadow — some 100 kilometres wide — will for the first time make land- In the Shadow of the Moon: The fall only in the United States, passing Science, Magic, and Mystery of Solar Eclipses over the homes of 12 million people in ANTHONY AVENI 14 states, from Oregon to the Caroli- Yale University Press: 2017. nas. Heliophysicists and umbraphiles from around the world are prepar- Eclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon ing for it, along with Department of FRANK CLOSE STOCKTREK IMAGES/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE GEOGRAPHIC IMAGES/NATIONAL STOCKTREK Transportation officials. The former Oxford University Press: 2017. are still pondering the results of the Mask of the Sun: The Science, 1999 eclipse, whose path crossed History, and Forgotten Lore of Europe from Cornwall to Romania Eclipses and beyond, and of total eclipses JOHN DVORAK since. The latter are doing their best Pegasus: 2017. to ensure that millions of drivers get safely into and out of the path. Aveni’s In the Shadow of the Moon The fuss is understandable. A total mines observations from five millen- solar eclipse is the most stupendous nia. We learn about eclipses in ancient sight in nature: the abruptly darken- Babylonia, such as those recorded ing sky; Baily’s beads, glints of sun- on a tablet fragment from 280 bc. light shining through lunar valleys; Aveni analyses the story that the the dazzling diamond-ring effect; Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus the spiky, pearly solar corona. Then, predicted the eclipse of 28 May 585 a couple of minutes later, the whole bc, which supposedly halted a bat- show in reverse. Equally compel- tle between the Lydians and Medes; ling is the knowledge that you are he is sceptical of links between these witnessing a syzygy, an alignment ancient dates and actual eclipses. of Earth, Moon and Sun that dark- He also delves into total eclipses ens the sky by an additional factor of seen in the United States, such as New 10,000 in the last minute alone. Now, York City’s in 1925: people sat on roofs four books all anticipate the coming The progress of an eclipse seen from Australia in 2012. along the Hudson River to mark the celestial event in different ways. shadow’s lower edge on 96th Street, In American Eclipse, journalist David scattering of sunlight that we see as the inner and the ‘diamond-ring effect’ was mentioned Baron harks back to the total eclipse visible corona would have misleadingly given Edison in the US media for the first time. Aveni con- in the United States in July 1878. (I read this the Sun’s surface temperature, 6,000 °C. cludes that neither rainbows, comets, meteors book in draft and provided a blurb.) A group Baron’s stories are good ones, well told. The nor the aurora borealis surpass “the transient, of eminent scientists, including astrono- pioneering US astronomer Maria Mitchell — exquisite beauty” of a total solar eclipse. mer Henry Draper and his wife, Anna (see the first professor hired at Vassar College in Particle physicist Frank Close tells more- S. Nelson Nature 539, 491–492; 2016), trav- Poughkeepsie, New York — took a group personal stories in Eclipse. In 1954, aged elled to Rawlins, Wyoming, to witness it. But, of alumnae, although they weren’t offered eight, Close viewed a partial solar eclipse; it as Baron relates, 31-year-old whizz-kid inven- free rail travel like their male counterparts. inspired him to become a scientist. Although tor Thomas Edison gained the lion’s share of Astronomer and inventor Samuel Pierpont clouds all but foiled Close’s attempt to see the publicity, even though he was just tagging Langley, meteorologist Cleveland Abbe and totality from Cornwall in 1999, he managed along. Edison brought one of his devices, a solar spectroscopist-astronomer Charles to catch subsequent events from Zambia, tasimeter, to measure minute shifts in heat Young also witnessed the eclipse. Nine Libya, Tahiti and, in 2013, a ship off the west from the Sun’s corona during the eclipse. He years before, Young had co-discovered the coast of Africa. As he notes, “Like druids, was unprepared for the strength of the sig- green line in the spectrum of the corona that who gather to greet equinoxes at Stonehenge, nal, however, and his instrument’s needle proved key in understanding coronal tem- I had joined an international cult whose pinned at its maximum reading. It wasn’t until perature; in the 1940s, it was found to come members worship the death and rebirth around 1940 that physicists Walter Grotrian, from iron gas so hot that many of its atoms of the sun at moveable Meccas, about half Bengt Edlén and Hannes Alfvén found the have lost half their electrons. a dozen times every decade”. Although he solar corona to have a temperature of at least The history of eclipses is global and long. weaves in a modicum of history and science, 1 million °C. Had the tasimeter worked, the Astronomer and science historian Anthony this is essentially a travel book. ©2017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts re25ser vMAYed. 2017 | VOL 545 | NATURE | 409 COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS Like Close, astronomer John MUSEUMS Dvorak hopscotches through eclipses in Mask of the Sun, but this is science his- tory rather than anecdote. The quotes he interweaves reveal the extraordinary The life and times of a pull the events have had on the human imagination. The writer Virginia Woolf, for instance, who had witnessed the 1927 curiosity-monger total solar eclipse in the north of England, wrote of it in her essay ‘The sun and the Henry Nicholls revels in a biography of Enlightenment fish’ the following year: “Show me the collector and Royal Society president Hans Sloane. eclipse, we say to the eye; let us see that strange spectacle again.” It’s a rich chronicle. Dvorak notes, for hat do bloodletting, slavery, instance, how in 1684 Increase Mather, journal editing and a silver penis the president of Harvard College in Cam- protector have in common? The bridge, Massachusetts, delayed the gradu- Weighteenth-century physician, collector and ation ceremony by ten days so that faculty president of the Royal Society Hans Sloane. PHOTOS.COM/GETTY members and students could reach Mar- In Collecting the World, historian James tha’s Vineyard off the state’s south coast Delbourgo charts Sloane’s rags-to-riches to see a total eclipse. (Mather, a Puritan transformation, from his birth in 1660 into minister, was less enlightened about the a family of domestic servants in the north Salem witch trials less than a decade later, of Ireland, to his death in 1753 as one of the refusing to condemn them.) We see how most influential figures in England. Sloane astronomer Edmond Halley predicted the became medic to the rich and famous and eclipse that crossed England in 1715, and used his personal wealth to amass the most gathered public observations to improve celebrated cabinet of curiosities of the age. prediction of the 1724 event that tra- Despite his celebrity in life, Sloane has versed the country to Europe. And we are managed to slip almost into obscurity: his reminded of the part an eclipse played in name lives on mostly in a handful of street Albert Einstein’s and place names, such as London’s Sloane rise to prominence. “A total solar Square. And he remains a shadowy figure in In his 1916 elabora- eclipse is Delbourgo’s book. There is little about what tion of his general the most he looked like, or about his family life — per- theory of relativity, haps because his archives are full of letters to, Einstein had pre- stupendous rather than from, him. But Delbourgo sheds Hans Sloane founded the British Museum. dicted a deviation in sight in magnificent light on Sloane’s larger world, the positions of stars nature.” providing great insight into the evolution of executions is “eerily dispassionate”. near the Sun dur- Britain’s early scientific and global ambitions. When not attending the duke, plantation ing an eclipse; three years later, English At the age of 16, Sloane survived a “violent owners or their slaves, Sloane indulged his astronomer Arthur Eddington success- haemorrhage”, a formative experience from dream of universal knowledge. This resulted fully measured it. which he emerged with intense ambition. in his natural history of the region: a lavish Along with other recent studies — such Moving from Ulster to London in 1679 to folio published in two volumes (in 1707 and as astronomer Tyler Nordgren’s fine Sun study medicine, he developed a talent for 1725), filled with hundreds of detailed, life- Moon Earth (Basic, 2016) and Mark Litt- self-advancement. He exploited the close- sized engravings of local plants, animals mann and Fred Espenak’s excellent and knit Anglo-Irish diaspora to cultivate a con- and curios. The work set a new standard thorough Totality (Oxford, 2017) — these nection with chemist and fellow of the Royal for scientific illustration, from which bota- books should enrich the understanding of Society Robert Boyle, and was introduced to nists such as Carl Linnaeus would benefit. anyone interested in eclipses. They pro- philosopher John Locke, naturalist John Ray Sloane distributed copies like calling cards, vide a worthy shelf-full for those gearing and physician Thomas Sydenham.